A Muslim youth has been killed in clashes between Christians and Muslims in southern Egypt prompted by a dispute over the building of a church in a predominantly Muslim town, police said Thursday.
Meanwhile, Attorney General Maher Abdel Wahed has ordered the release of 10 of 21 Christians being held over the injuring of at least 60 policemen in clashes earlier this month, judicial sources said.
The deadly violence began after young Muslims in a town in Minya province, 250 kilometers (156 miles) south of Cairo, suspected that Christian villagers wanted to demolish a home in the area and build a church in its place.
The Muslims claimed the Christians were backtracking on a pledge last year not to proceed with the project and continue to use a church nearly two kilometers away.
They argued that the Christians did not need a church in the town, as there were only 500 of them compared to 20,000 Muslims.
Police said they made several arrests after the two sides went at each other with rocks and sticks. Gunfire was also heard.
Under a 19th century law introduced by Egypt's then Ottoman rulers, Christians can build churches only under certain conditions. These include their being a majority in the area and there being no mosque nearby.
Christians complained that they had to go through layers of bureaucracy in order to obtain a permit to build a church, and that by the time they got one, demographic and other conditions would have changed.
In Cairo, meanwhile, the release of detainees brings to 23 the number of those freed so far after 13 Christians, nearly all of them students and minors, were sent home on December 21.
A number of policemen were hurt on December 8 when around 1,000 Christians, staging a sit-in at the compound of the main Coptic cathedral in Cairo, threw rocks at them.
The demonstrators were protesting at the disappearance of a priest's wife north of Cairo. They claimed the woman was abducted by her Muslim boss and forced to convert to Islam, with the complicity of the state security services.
Nearly 400 Egyptian Christians also demonstrated on December 5 at the cathedral, calling on President Hosni Mubarak to intervene.
The head of Egypt's Coptic Church, Pope Shenuda III, later holed himself up in a desert monastery to protest the arrest of Christians, but returned after the release of the first batch.